A Note to Readers
I’ll be taking a break from regular posting over the next few weeks, but wanted to let you know I’ll be back – possibly right before the elections, possibly right after, depending on how plans for the further evolution of Deedspeakout evolve.
The blog will be moving platforms – to a website proper, fully-searchable by topic and date. During the transition, I’ll continue to post on Deedspeakout’s Facebook page – for those of you who don’t use FB, no problem; it’s a public page which doesn’t require you to join Facebook. Posts there are more frequent; they cover the same range of topics as the blog, but there’s a lot of variety.
I’m also considering changing the name of the blog/site/FB page/Twitter feed, and reader suggestions would be very welcome and appreciated.
At this point, I could simply say that events have overwhelmed me, and that would in a sense be true. Given the areas covered here, namely health and healthcare, the environment, justice, and education, the last six months have been brutal: the public health crisis of Covid-19, climate change-related extreme weather events (wildfires in the West, flooding in the South and Southeast), protests surrounding police brutality (the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, the wounding of Jacob Blake), and the largely disastrous efforts, in absence of any nationally-coordinated policy, plan, and funding to re-open K-12 schools and universities.
In short, there’s been plenty to discuss and reflect upon – maybe too much.
But more than this, the approach of the November elections is beginning to taint and distort what’s being reported and how it’s being reported in the legacy and progressive media which form the basis for commentary here. When I came up with the name for the blog, “Deedspeakout,” the idea was to let the facts on the ground, namely the verifiable consequences of longstanding and inequitable policies, tell their own story – after all, “actions speak louder than words.” But at the moment we’re drowning metaphorically in a sea of partisan words, and that sea of partisanship is drowning out the facts themselves.
I want to step back, do more background reading on the subjects I cover – in the future, book discussions will become a regular feature – to rethink the ways(s) the four main topic areas, plus a new one – housing – are presented. Over time, I’ve come to realize how tightly intertwined health and environment, education and justice, really are. The stories I select for discussion almost always illustrate more than one inequity – in fact, the five topics are constantly crisscrossing one another in a complex skein whose individual strands are very challenging to untangle and present as a coherent narrative.
In addition, my own life is about to enter a transitional phase – a new and challenging phase I’m looking forward to, but one which will absorb a lot of time. When the transitional period is completed, I’m hoping to be able to devote even more effort and time to study, reflection and writing, but to achieve this some substantial regrouping is necessary.
Finally: when the website goes live and related changes have been made to the Facebook page, original blog, and Twitter feed, I’ll be switching to the first person. The past three years have inspired me to continue identifying and reflecting at length on the many crossroads of injustice in society, and I’ll be signing my posts – I stand by them.
Here’s hoping you’ll join me on this journey.
Deborah Brown Kazazis